Saint Augustine

Saint Augustine (sānt ô`gəstēn), city (1990 pop. 11,692), seat of St. Johns co., NE Fla.; inc. 1824. Located on a peninsula between the Matanzas and San Sebastian rivers, it is separated from the Atlantic Ocean by Anastasia Island; the Intracoastal Waterway passes through the city. St. Augustine is a port of entry, a shrimping and commercial fishing center, and a popular year-round resort. The economic mainstay is tourism, supplemented with revenues from small industries. The oldest city in the United States, it was founded in 1565 by the Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilés on the site of an ancient Native American village and near the place where Ponce de Léon, the discoverer of Florida, had landed in 1513. The town was burned and sacked by the English buccaneers Sir Francis Drake (1586) and Capt. John Davis (1665). St. Augustine repelled attacks by South Carolinians in 1702–3 and in 1740 by James Oglethorpe, the founder of Georgia, but it passed to the English in 1763 at the end of the French and Indian Wars. In the American Revolution, Tories flocked to the city from the North but left when it reverted to Spain in 1783. In 1821, Spain ceded Florida to the United States, and St. Augustine grew rapidly until the Seminole War in the 1830s. Union troops occupied the city in Mar., 1862, and held it throughout the Civil War. Among the old landmarks is

Castillo de San Marcos (kăstē`yō də săn mär`kəs), now a national monument (see National Parks and Monuments, table). The oldest masonry fort in the country (built 1672–96), it was Spain's northernmost outpost on the Atlantic in the Americas.

Fort Matanzas (mətăn`zəs), also a national monument, was built by Spain in 1742. Other places of interest in the city are the old schoolhouse, the house reputed to be the oldest in the United States (said to date from the late 16th cent.), and the cathedral (built 1793–97; partly restored). Flagler College is in the city.

Bibliography

See G. E. Baker, The Oldest City (1983); J. P. M. Waterbury, Augustine History (1989).

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Saint Augustine

City (pop., 2000: 11,592), northeastern Florida, U.S. It is the oldest continuously settled U.S. city. In 1513 Juan Ponce de León landed there in search of the Fountain of Youth and claimed the territory for Spain. It became part of the U.S. in 1821. The Castillo de San Marcos, now a national monument, is a symbol of the era of Spanish control. During the American Revolution the city was a refuge for loyalists, and during the Indian Wars it was the place of imprisonment for Osceola and other Seminoles. It is a winter and summer resort and a port on the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. The economy is based on tourism and fishing.

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Saint Augustine

a resort in NE Florida, on the Intracoastal Waterway: the oldest town in North America (1565); the northernmost outpost of the Spanish colonial empire for over 200 years. Pop.: 11 915 (2003 est.)

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Augustine, Saint 

(also Aurelius Augustinus or Augus-tinus Sanctus). Born Nov. 13, 354, in Thagaste, Numidia, North Africa; died Aug. 28, 430, in Hippo, North Africa. Christian theologian and most illustrious representative of Western patrology. At first he was under the spell of Man-ichaeism and skepticism; he was baptized in 387. From 395 he was bishop of Hippo.

The spiritual world of Augustine is characteristically antithetic: a unique intellectual sensibility as opposed to a tendency to bracing dogma, and a developed individualistic consciousness as opposed to a church-inspired, impersonal mysticism. Augustine’s ontology and his teachings about God as an absolute being follow Neoplatonism, but Augustine attempted to rethink old ideas, starting from the subject rather than the object, and from human thought as self-evident witness, an anticipation of Descartes’ basic concept. According to Augustine, the existence ofGod is the connotation of man’s cognition of himself, while the existence of objects is not; this train of thought is similar to Anselm of Canterbury’s and the reverse of Thomas Aquinas’ approach. Augustine’s psy-chologism is revealed in his doctrine of time as a correlate of a remembering, percepting, and expectant soul.

A new feature in Augustine’s thinking was his attention to two problems ignored by heathen philosophy: the dynamics of human personality and the dynamics of mankind’s history. The former is dealt with in his Confessions—an inner autobiography that presents Augustine’s spiritual development from infancy to his final self-affirmation as an orthodox Christian. With a psychological self-analysis which was unattainable in heathen literature and philosophy, Augustine depicted the complexity of the formation of the personality. Augustine’s personalism implicitly inferred the doctrine of predestination. From an observation of the dark “abysses” of the soul, Augustine arrived at the conclusion of the necessity of God’s grace, which saves man’s nature from self-sufficiency and therefore leads to eternal salvation. The mystic recognition of history’s dialectic is presented in the treatise The City of God, which was written after Rome’s capture by Alaric in 410. Augustine perceived two opposite types of human communities: the earthly city, that is, a state based on “love of self extending to disregard of God,” and the heavenly city, a spiritual community based on “love of God extending to disregard of self.” The heavenly city is certainly not identical to the political theocracy, in the spirit of which medieval Catholic ideologists interpreted Augustine’s teachings; he stressed the unworldliness of the heavenly city and the impossibility of adapting it to political reality. Augustine found apt words to criticize the “Cain-like” spirit of the empire, the predatory nature of the civilization of late antiquity, and the callousness of the Romans, who conquered foreign cities and then complained when the same was done to their own city. However, Augustine found that all violence—from violence toward children in schools, expressively described in Confessions, to state violence—is the result of the sinful depravity of man and, although contemptible, is inevitable. For this reason, Augustine recognized the necessity for the authority of the state, which he likened to a “large band of robbers.”

Augustine’s influence was manifold. For the medieval era, Augustine was an undisputed authority on religion and philosophy who had no equal until Thomas Aquinas. The Platonic orientation of early scholasticism originated with him. His skill in conveying individual emotions was admired by the Humanists, and his experience of grace, by the early Protestants. The confession motif in the sentimental literature of Rousseau and others brought Augustine’s experience of introspection into the secular sphere. Contemporary Catholic neoscholastic thinkers, unsatisfied with the rationality of Thomism, turn to Augustine. Existentialists see Augustine as one of their forebears.

WORKS

Opera omnia, vols. 1–11. Paris, 1864–65 (Patrologiae cursus compl., ser. latina . . . , vols. 32–47). Edited by J.-P. Migne.
In Russian translation:
Tvoreniia Blazhennogo Avgustina, 2nd ed., parts 1–7. Kiev, 1901–12.

REFERENCES

Trubetskoi, E. Religiozno-obshchestvennyi ideal zapadnogo khristianstva v V veke, part 1, Moscow, 1892.
Ger’e, V. Bl. Avgustin. Moscow, 1910.
Popov, I. V. Lichnost’ i uchenie Bl. Avgustina, vol. 1, parts 1–2. Sergiev Posad, 1916.
Istoriia filosofii, vol. 1. Moscow, 1940. Pages 391–96.
Maier, F. G. Augustin und das antike Rom. [Stuttgart-Cologne,] 1955.
Jaspers, K. Die grossen Philosophen, vol. 1. Munich, 1957.
Hessen, J. Augustins Metaphysik der Erkenntnis. Leiden, 1960.
Deane, H. A. The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine. New York-London, 1963.

S. S. AVERINTSEV